Postmodernism

I've been re-reading an essay on Postmodernism, written from an engineers point of view. When I was forced to study Post Modernism at university I quickly came to the conclusion that there was very little substance to it. But this quote seems to sum it up more succinctly than I ever could.

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever hand-waving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all.

One particularly bizarre example of this was the when one Post-Modern author decided to read E=MC2 as misogynist as it raised the Speed of Light (apparently a masculine speed) as being more important than any other speeds. When I started to read the classical philosophers this lack of substance became particually apparent, Jean Baudrillard, for example, spent his entire life trying to rediscover Cartesian Doubt, or as the author points out:

The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers.

saying in conclusion that the reason that the Literary Criticism, and not the sciences, has degraded like this is because:

Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous.

This reminded me of an idea of Eric Raymond called the Deadly Genius,

deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to emulate his disruptive brilliance — even when those followers lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the genius has defined.

The interesting thing is that he attributes this to a very similar cause to the atrophy of literary criticism found in the first essay. Namely that they got cut off from the rigors of a large audience and so the rot that started with people trying to follow the lead of the Deadly Genius was allowed to grow unchecked.

After 1900 all this changed. Wolfe [Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House] elucidates some of the complex reasons that artists found themselves with more freedom and less security than ever before. In an increasingly bourgeois climate, the cry went up that artistic creation must become autonomous, heeding its own internal imperatives as much as (or more than) the demands of any audience.

So like literary criticism it became introverted, and unable to bring new ideas into the meme pool withered away to a shadow. This spilled over in the Modernist movement, one of the triggers for the suicide of literary criticism was as a response to the modernist wave. Almost everything was hit by modernism, some areas such as architecture worse than others. But as these areas still had to appeal to an audience they could not implode completely. Modernist architecture might have lead to the creation of the tower block, but when it became apparent that when lived in by real people they became ugly vertical slums a more traditional approach reasserted itself. In buildings that did not have living inhabitants, such as museums, the trend of modernism has continued producing buildings like the Guggenheim that is a wonderful piece of architecture but not actually that much use as a museum. Possibly this is because these buildings are not built for human tenants but for arts committees that want a striking building to open and don't care much about the actual business of using it to display objects other than itself.